Excerpt from The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You're fucking kidding me."

He cleared his throat. "I don't suppose I look like I'm kidding you."

"Whose idea is that?" Geraci said. Neri didn't have a gun in his hand, but Geraci could not leave this scummy garage alive if he shot anyone but Tessio. From that back office, the television set erupted in a gale of tinny applause.

"Don't know, don't care," Neri said. "I'm just the messenger, sir."

Geraci cocked his head. This dumbass didn't seem witty enough to make a joke about shooting the messenger. But he did seem sadistic enough to take it on himself to make the killing as cruel as possible. And sir? How did he mean that? "Salvatore Tessio," Geraci said, "no matter what he's done, deserves more respect than that."

"Fuck youse!" Tessio said, loud now, but eyes still on the slimy floor.

"Look up," Neri ordered Tessio. "Traitor."

Trembling no worse, the old man did as he was told, eyes dry, staring into Geraci's but already far away. He muttered a rapid string of names that meant nothing to Nick Geraci.

Geraci raised the gun, both sickened by and grateful for the sight of his own steady hand. He pressed the barrel gently against the old man's soft forehead. Tessio did not move, did not blink, did not even shake anymore. His saggy flesh pillowed around the gun sight. Geraci had never before killed a man with a gun.

"Just business," Tessio whispered.

What made my father great, Michael Corleone had said at his father's eulogy, was that nothing was ever just business. Everything was personal. My father was just a man, as mortal as anyone. But he was a great man, and I am not the only person here today who thought of him as a god among men.

"What are you waiting for?" Tessio whispered. "Sono fottuto. Shoot me. You pussy."

Geraci shot.

Tessio's body flew backward so hard his knees made a sound like snapped roof shingles. The air was filled with a glowing pinkish gray mist. A yarmulke-sized piece of Tessio's skull caromed off the wall of the garage, smacked Neri in the face, and clattered to the floor. The tang of Tessio's airborne blood mixed with the smell of his shit.

Nick Geraci rubbed his shoulder–the pistol kick was like a savage right cross–and felt a wave of euphoria wash over him, obliterating the hesitation he'd felt. He felt no remorse, no fear, no disgust, no anger. I am a killer, he thought. Killers kill.

He spun around, laughing not out of madness but joy, more intense, better than the rush he'd gotten the time he sampled his own heroin. He knew what was happening. This was not the first man he'd killed. Sometimes when he killed he felt nothing at all, but even that might have been a lie, he told himself. Because the plain truth was that killing people felt good. Anyone who'd done it could tell you that, but they won't. They won't! A book Geraci had read about the First World War had a whole chapter on the subject. Hardly anyone would talk about it because for most people the bad feeling that came later, after the good feeling, shut them up. Plus, any shithead could guess that everything that would happen after a person proclaimed that it felt good to kill people, and after he convinced his listeners that he was serious, would be entirely bad. Still. It felt good. Almost sexual (another thing any shithead could guess would be bad to admit). You're powerful and the dead guy's not. You're alive and the dead guy's dead. You've done something that everyone on earth has at some heated moment wanted to do but most never will. It was easy, and it felt magnificent. Geraci practically skated across the scummy floor of that garage, certain that, this time, the bad feeling would not come later. There would be no later. Everything would always be now. Everything is always now.

Excerpted from The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner Copyright © 2004 by Mark Winegardner. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.